This is one of my favorite features of WindowFX, although there are many cool features which are equally as cool. Many people think WindowFX is only about animating windows and the start menu on your Windows PC desktop. Sure, that’s a big part of it but there’s other things that are especially useful as well. Let's look at what you can do using your middle mouse button.

You can set WindowFX to enable a flip feature where when you press the middle mouse button the window will “flip” and show you process information, allow you to open the containing folder, etc.

Get WindowFX here.

Tiles is one of the newest apps from Stardock that lets you take control of windows and running applications on your Windows desktop.  Tiles places a customizable sidebar on the edge of your screen where you can view and interact with applications running.  There are a bunch of options and configurations for Tiles that lets it work the way you want it to, making organization easy to do.

One of the ways I personally use Tiles is to use it a “virtual” desktop.  I have several pages configured for common applications I use daily.  For instance, I have a page for Office documents, one for web browsers, and another for e-mail clients.  Usually with several applications running at the same time for each page, this can easily create a very crowded desktop.  With Tiles though, I configure it to minimize and restore windows when pages are switched.  When I switch to my Office page, all the windows in the Office page restore to the desktop.  Switch to another page and those minimize and bring up the windows on the other page. 

Here’s a quick video to show an example.

Another favorite use is just using it to switch applications.  The Windows task bar isn’t bad, but unless you hover your mouse over an icon, you are limited to just seeing the icon representing an open window.  Tiles gives you a live preview of the open window which is especially good when you have multiple windows open from the same application.  Of course, you can customize Tiles to show icons, captions, etc. to give as much (or as little) information as you want.

These are just a couple of examples of how you can use Tiles to help manage your desktop.  Tiles has a bunch of configuration options that lets you adjust Tiles to your workflow.

Get Tiles - https://www.stardock.com/products/tiles/

The other day I wrote a guide on how to purchase using the in-app functionality, and today I wanted to follow-up with another quick guide on how to activate purchases made.  If you purchased an additional feature for Stardock Tiles, or have Tiles as part of the Object Desktop suite, you might need to activate your existing purchase/features.

Open the Tiles configuration window and navigate down to the ‘Add features” area.  Then click Activate existing purchases button.

Now just enter your Stardock account e-mail and password.

Tiles should recognize it and activate the features available for Tiles.

Tiles 1.0 has been released and is now available for download.  Tiles works by creating a side-bar on a user’s display. At the top of the side-bar are labels for each page such as ‘My Tiles’ or ‘Documents’ or ‘Apps’. Users can then drag and drop programs, documents, or website URLs onto Tiles. When the program is inactive, it appears as an icon. When it is active, it appears as a live preview tile.

Although it’s a free app there is an enhanced version available as well. You can upgrade to additional features or premium skins right inside the Tiles app itself.  This guide will show you how.

Open the Tiles configuration screen by right-clicking and selecting it in Tiles.  Choose the ‘Add features’ section.  Here you can browse through the available features and premium skins. There’s a variety available and you can just purchase the entire bundle for $9.95, or just individual parts.  You can also active existing purchases by entering your Stardock account information.

After you find the features you want and have added them to the cart, you can now begin the checkout process.  You will first be asked to enter your e-mail address.

Next you enter your information and payment method.

Next you’ll see a summary and then you just need to click Purchase to complete the transaction. 

You will now get a confirmation and your new features should be activated and ready to use!

If you’ve been looking for a program to replace Windows Media Center which performs all its functions and is highly customizable, you’ve got to take a look at Media Portal.

It has Main areas: My Music, My Videos, My Pictures and my Weather. It’ll play all the file types WMC does, and do it your way via slews of plug-ins. You can create your own playlists and

• Watch Live TV or schedule and record
• Play videos, movies and DVDs
• Browse EPG and upcoming programs
• Listen to music and radio
• Stream media, radio, TV to any connected HTPC/PC connected to your network
• View pictures or create slideshows
• Browse all your movies
• Check weather, news, or information on the web and even play games

And, you can make it look the way you want with many different skins to choose from and tutorial videos. There are widescreen and non-wide galleries. You even skin the weather app.

Check out the skins here: http://www.team-mediaportal.com/extensions/widescreen

Anyway, I figured folks here would want to see it:

These are all different skins. You really should take a look at their gallery. It’s easy to navigate.

Hey! Have a happy Sunday!

Source:

http://www.team-mediaportal.com/

http://www.thewindowsclub.com/media-portal-open-source-windows-media-center-replacement

Now that Tiles is available, I wanted to start showing off some of the features that makes Tiles pretty awesome.  First, we’ll start off with Pages as this is an important configuration and has a significant impact on how you interact with Tiles.

Remember, if you don’t have Tiles, get the info here: https://www.stardock.com/products/tiles/

Adding and Removing Pages

In your Tiles configuration the first option is Pages which is going to let you customize the pages in Tiles, and assign them different properties if you so desire.  When you start Tiles you are already presented with some default pages like Web, but of course you might want to keep them all, or delete them all and start from scratch.  Regardless of what you want to do, it’s easy to add and remove Pages.

In the upper right-hand you have a button labeled Add.  Just click that and enter the name for the page you want and it’s ready to use or setup further.  To remove a page just click the one you want to delete and click the X next to it.

Configuring Pages

Select a page from the list and click the pencil icon to enter the configuration page for it.  Here you can select which windows should show on the page.  You can select to only show windows from applications you select from, or to show all windows with exceptions that you can also choose.

I’m using this page as a document-only page, so for something like this I would only want to show windows from document apps I use such as Microsoft Word, Excel, etc.  You can either select an app by selecting it in explorer, or you can select from applications you have running.  You can further fine tune windows that show based on their state or applications that have recently run.

As you can see in the screenshot, I have my Documents Page with Word and Excel showing.  Now I can have a virtual desktop of my document windows that can be minimized and maximized when scrolling through pages as you can see in this quick demo video.

I have been looking at WinCustomize and realize that in the almost 5 years that I have been here I have written so many articles that I really have no idea how many I have done.  One thing is for sure, and that’s it sure is a lot of them! 

It’s cool to see that an article I wrote in 2007 has been viewed about 400,000 times!

http://islanddog.joeuser.com/article/147986

If you noticed I linked to the article on JU.  Why?  Well honestly because I couldn’t find it on WC.   Which brings me to my something I have been working on as trying to find articles, guides, etc. on WC can be challenging.  I was trying to think of an easy way to bookmark items that others can view for quick access.  Obviously your browser can bookmark things, but I don’t like to crowd up my browser bookmarks with such things.

I saw that Delicious got a big redesign and one of its new features is Stacks.

This is exactly what I was looking for!  I’m going  to place the most common and useful articles, guides,etc. here so people can easily find and link to them.

What do you think?  Will this help any of you?

http://delicious.com/stacks/view/K0hhfC#m=list

I also tried Pinboard, which has a much simpler view - http://pinboard.in/u:islanddog/t:WinCustomize/

Microsoft is working on Windows 8 which will have a new experience called “Metro” that will serve as an alternative to the traditional Windows desktop. It’s been optimized for tablet computing and looks phenomenal.

Meanwhile, Stardock has been working for the past year on having a Metro experience on the Windows desktop.

Tiles is something new. It is not a “side bar”. It is not a virtual desktop program. Rather, it lets users organize all their “stuff” into Metro-style pages that can be switched between to instantly gain access to the windows, programs, and data relevant to that page.

To add something to a page, the user merely drags and drops the active window over to it (or alternatively the URL or document or program short-cut). It’s a new way of working with Windows that adheres to the concepts Microsoft has pioneered with the Windows Phone UI and soon in Windows 8.

Video demo: youtu.be/5dPmRbyAY5s

To learn more visit: www.stardock.com/products/tiles

Summer is almost over and what a summer it was!

The summer started with Stardock selling its Impulse digital distribution platform to GameStop. This was the first time in Stardock’s history that it has ever sold one of its business units.

The reason Stardock sold Impulse was because Impulse’s success was starting to come at the expense of the other two parts of Stardock – the software and games groups which had seen resources being taken from them to put onto Impulse to handle its amazing growth. If Stardock’s goal was to become predominantly a digital retailer, that would have been fine, but it wasn’t. Stardock’s primary objective is to make cool stuff, not sell other people’s cool stuff.

In the near-term, our software and games will continue to be purchased, downloaded and updated exclusively through Impulse. But we expect to have a new, albeit much simpler, digital distribution system for Stardock’s own software and games up and running before the end of the year that you’ll be able to start purchasing, downloading, and updating through. We must warn you, however. It won’t be anywhere near as expansive as Impulse or even Stardock Central. It’ll just be there for making it quick to download and update your stuff. Very un-intrusive.

So by now, many of you have probably seen some of the videos of Windows 8.  If you haven’t, let me walk you through it.

The Windows 8 experience is going to be dominated by a new user interface currently called “Metro”. There’s no “desktop” which means no taskbar, no system tray no start menu. You work with Windows in a way that’s similar to the way one would work with their iPad or Android device.

I have to say, I think it’s pretty cool in many respects. Or more to the point, I think it will be cool once they iron out all the usability gotchas in it (which I think may take them a version or two).

Making Metro make sense

That’s where Stardock’s upcoming program, Tiles comes in. A couple of years ago, when I started seeing what Microsoft was doing with what came to be called Windows Phone, I thought about how the current Windows desktop metaphor was pretty long in the tooth.

So I got talking to Neil (the lead on such programs like WindowBlinds and Multiplicity) and sketched out how one might manage their stuff in the future.  We’d already made virtual desktop programs in the past as well as various side-bar programs (Control Center and ObjectBar to name two). 

What we needed was something that made sense in today’s PC world. A world where lots of people have multiple monitors and are increasingly dealing with tasks that involve lots of different programs and are running systems that might be up for days or weeks at a time.

That’s the origin story of Tiles.  And as you learn more about Windows 8 and how it relegates the existing Windows desktop to being just a single “tile” in the Metro universe, I think you’ll find Tiles as being the killer app. 

And don’t worry, Stardock plans to extend the Metro experience for users who are using Metro on their PC (i.e. we don’t want PC users to have to sacrifice usability so that others can use it as a tablet OS).

Stardock Tiles Beta

If you want to get access to the next Stardock Tiles beta, get Object Desktop. It’s our full suite of Windows experience enhancements.